City on Fire

FOUR

In the end, Aiah’s heart fails her where Gil is concerned. She writes him a letter and sends it surface mail instead of using a wiregram or making a phone call. Her written explanations and excuses are awkward, unconvincing even to herself. She knows that he will have a hard time paying for the apartment they’d shared, and so she wires him ten thousand dalders out of her account in Gunalaht.

Conscience money. And sure proof to the Jaspeeri authorities of her profitable, and to them criminal, activities.

She and Ethemark march through the Owl Wing, putting plastic slips on the doors of empty offices that announce they are now part of the Plasm Enforcement Division. She then informs the Palace Property Department, in charge of room allocations, that the offices are now theirs. Theirs, by right of conquest and the fact that no one, in the confusion, disputes them.

The interviewing and hiring begins. Drumbeth announces publicly that plasm thieves have a thirty-day amnesty in which to inform the authorities of their illegal plasm taps, meters, and connections. Public response is tepid, but the deadline provides Aiah with a firm date by which she has to be ready.

She promises herself that the first arrests will be made at 24:01 on the day following the deadline. One minute after the amnesty ends.

During the next two weeks, Constantine visits her twice more in her suite, spending his rare moments of spare time in her company. She is working double shifts, but his schedule is worse. Depending on the state of his elusive progress through the complexities of coalition politics, his moods swing between booming elation and fretful anxiety. But when he touches her, when he kisses her or moves with her in bed, his mood shifts: he is entirely there, intent eyes holding her as if she were pinned in the radiance of searchlights, a kind of scrutiny that would be frightening if it weren’t for the fact that, apparently, he approves of what he sees.

Daily Aiah feeds on plasm-energy to keep away the bone-weariness that, in normal circumstance, her responsibilities and schedule should inflict upon her. But the plasm also makes her fearless, gives her a sense of invincibility. She is bolder than she would be otherwise.

The taste of power sings through her nerves all day, an echo of the world’s ultimate chorus, of its strangely pliant reality.

She is willing certain things into being. Time will tell if she is successful.

SECOND TITANIC MONTH LORDS OF THE NEW CITY SEE IT NOW!

Aiah soars out over the city. Plasm sings a song of triumph in her ectoplasmic ears. In the distance, ringing the metropolis on all sides, she can see the city’s crown, the point at which it becomes possible to build on bedrock, and where thousands of tall buildings loom over the flat aspect of the sea.

A vast, invisible technical array makes possible this flight. Underneath it all is the well of plasm that interlaces Caraqui, that underlies it like its very own sea, that flows in mains and is collected in capacitors and powers the aspirations of a thousand mages.

Beneath the Aerial Palace is one collection point, the huge room sheathed in steel and bronze, holding its collected plasm in towers of gleaming brass and black ceramic. Governing this power, beneath the watchful eyes of the icon of Two-Faced Tangid, are the technicians in the control room, watching their dials, consulting their schedules, throwing worn butter-smooth brass levers that lower contacts into the receptacles atop the accumulators, that start the flood of plasm along its predestined route. And from there the plasm floods upward, like water under high pressure, along circuits and conduits to the roof, where it pours along the scalloped transmission horn set at 044 degrees true, and from there leaps into the sky.

Aiah sits in her office, the t-grip in her hand now wired into the circuit. Her mind molds the plasm to her will, controls her flight over the dome of the city. Her sensorium—the complex of senses with which she has endowed herself—sights for landmarks, finds them, corrects her flight. She brings her awareness from her plasm-sensorium into her body, laying a mundane reality onto the hyperreal sensations of plasm.

She looks at her office clock. She has a few minutes before she has to keep her appointment.

She will stay, then, in flight a moment more.

Aiah expands her sensorium, concentrating on the city’s distant crown and the places that lie beyond. The Sea of Caraqui is wide, and Caraqui covers much more area than the average metropolis, though its population densities are lower. The long borders have given Caraqui a large number of neighbors, most of whom cannot be delighted with the new government popping up among them.

Aiah has done her homework, laboring away on one of the terminals of the Worldwide News Service. Worldwide was the Keremaths’ wire and data service, and its background reports showed the signs of their policy and their censors, but Aiah was able to read between the lines of censorship, the shifting boundaries of what could be said and not-said, and has now gained an idea of what lies beyond Caraqui’s crown.

Behind Aiah, to the south, is Barchab, with its prominent twin volcanoes. Barchab is a kind of oligarchy, reasonably prosperous, with an economy based on mining the mineral resources of its volcanic plateau. The government features a dozen major parties, each representing a coalition of moneyed interests, all vying for control of a weak legislature. Governmental influence is limited, and the wealthy arrange things among themselves.

Aiah does not believe that Barchab will look on the new government of Caraqui with any great delight.

Southeast and east is Koroneia, where a conservative oligarchic government called the Committee of Sixty has displaced a well-meaning military junta, the Metropolitan Social Revolutionary Council, whose staggering ineptitude reached its climax when its own military declined to fight in its defense. The Committee of Sixty, which took power with Keremath support, has ruled for three years now, and has not yet succeeded in defining its objectives, let alone managing a coherent policy.

Ahead, to the northeast, is Lanbola. Though the constitution is that of a federal republic, the Popular Democratic Party has managed to win every election for the last sixty-seven years through methods ranging from bribery and extortion to a low-level terror campaign waged against its rivals. Lanbola’s attitude toward Caraqui’s new government may be summarized by the fact that, since the coup, it has banned the chromoplay Lords of the New City and has given refuge to some of the surviving Keremaths.

Northward Caraqui shares a short border with Charna, a state that sprawls north to the Pole. The military seized power in Charna fifty years ago and haven’t given it up, despite occasional brief periods of fighting among cabals of officers. Charna had got along perfectly well with the Keremaths.

Northwest is Nesca, a smallish metropolis that rejoices in a functioning parliamentary democracy. Its government seems inexplicably hostile to Caraqui’s new rulers, and has issued a number of statements condemning the violence with which the triumvirate established itself.

West is the horror of Sabaya, which has been dominated for the last seventy-five years by Field Marshal the Serene Lord Dr. Iromaq, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Magical Arts, Savior of the Nation, etc., etc., a man from whom even the Keremaths recoiled. Sabaya’s ghastly regime, inept, cash-poor, and brutal, is a byword for poverty, terror, and oppression. Whatever goes on behind its closed borders goes on largely unobserved, as if within some all-encompassing shroud of darkness.

These are the neighbors among which Caraqui’s new government now stands. Uneasy, hostile, or unstable, friendly for the most part with the Keremaths, none are likely to welcome an unruly set of newcomers like Caraqui’s triumvirate, let alone an ominous foreign presence like Constantine.

And then, below her hovering anima, a miracle blossoms: color expands in midair from a central point like water bursting from a main, like a kaleidoscope gone mad… but soon concrete images begin to form—faces, images, fancies—one turning into another like the products of dream. A man on skates. A tree that blossoms in seconds and produces red fruit, which falls of its own accord into the laps of a circle of smiling children. A tall building, granite and glass, which begins to contort, to shimmy in a kind of dance. Disembodied hands and eyes, a burning egg, a burning key, a wine bottle made of stone…

The Dreaming Sisters are at play in the sky.

Aiah looks for a sourceline for the cloud of images but can’t see one. The vision begins to move westward, toward ominous Sabaya, skipping through the air like a plate skimming the sea. Aiah watches in delight until it vanishes in the distance.

She will have to find out more about the Dreaming Sisters someday.

But now her concerns are more mundane. She orients herself over her target, then drops into a district of cheap flats, warehouses, and illegal factories where the children of Caraqui toil at unforgiving machines for double shifts every day.

The half-world of Aground lies somewhere hereabouts, hidden beneath the streets. On these shallow mudflats, many of the buildings have conventional architecture, with foundations reaching to bedrock; and others, centuries old, are on concrete pontoons that moored themselves in mud long ago.

Aiah is looking for one of the latter. It isn’t hard to find, a sprawling, crumbling warren of brown-brick tenements so ancient that the only thing keeping them upright are the rusting iron braces and props added to the structure. Once there, Aiah has to be more circumspect, on the chance that the people she is looking for might also be on the lookout for her.

She carries her sensorium in an anima, a plasm body that she hasn’t bothered to will into the shape of an actual human body: it’s a diffuse cloud of plasm she has configured to remain sensitive to its environment. Carefully she drops the anima beneath street level, where the huge grounded pontoons loom on either side and the dark brackish sea slops over the mudflats below. There is little light here, but plasm can be configured to see in the dark. Aiah moves between the pontoon walls until she comes to a mark, scored lightly into the crumbling concrete, that she has left earlier.

At this point she reconfigures her anima, confining it to a narrow pipette of plasm that should be difficult to detect, and then rises through the midst of the tenement, through iron beams and brick arches and worn plastic flooring, through uninspiring sights of people cooking or doing laundry or watching video, past children playing or sleeping or fighting with each other, until she reaches the hallway outside the Silver Hand plasm house she has been observing for the last week.

The hallway’s flaking paint is scarred with decades’ worth of graffiti. The crumbling plastic flooring, a cheap imitation of an old Geoform design, has worn clear through in spots, and has been overlaid with ribbed plastic mats—probably not for the convenience or safety of the tenants, but for the benefit of the Silver Hand, who moved truckloads of plasm batteries through this hallway.

Aiah ghosts along at floor height, looking for the mage she’s relieving. She wills her sensorium to become sensitive to plasm, and finds a little flare from a not-quite-concealed sourceline in the hallway, near the baseboard. She ghosts up to the flare, wills a little extrusion of her own plasm to touch the sourceline.

—This is Aiah, she pulses. Anything doing?

She senses a flare of surprise from the other ghost. He is one of Aiah’s new hires, a newly graduated mage from Liri-Domei, a little inexperienced but learning quickly.

—The deliveries went out before midbreak, he broadcasts. The Ferret’s inside filling batteries. The Slug is there with him.

—The Mole?

—Been and gone.

The code names date from an earlier phase of the observation, when Aiah and her unit were ignorant of the names of the Handmen they were observing. But the codes were more descriptive than the Handmen’s actual names, and remain in force.

—I’ll relieve you, then, Aiah sends.

—Nothing much happening. Good luck.

The other mage fades. Aiah slides through the wall and extrudes a minute part of her plasm-body to the other side.

The Silver Hand is very confident here. A plasm house should be sheathed in bronze or at least bronze mesh, like Lamarath’s office in Aground, to prevent anyone like Aiah from peering inside. But the Silver Hand isn’t worried about the forces of the law, or apparently anyone else. They operate openly. Thousands of people must know about this place.

The Silver Hand will learn caution in time. But Aiah intends to gather as much information as possible while they are still careless, and then strike. If she had more time, and more people, she could fashion a single powerful attack that would prove lethal to all of them; but as it is, with the knowledge she possesses and the weapons she has been given, she will do her best to make the blow a heavy one.

Aiah opens her plasm-senses, sees the two Silver Hand men inside their place of business. Each is of a type. Gangsters, Aiah suspects, are the same everywhere. The young are exuberant and dress in exaggerations of fashionable styles—the Ferret wears yards of lace and a plush velvet jacket, purple with brass studs in decorative patterns. His hair is permed and dressed in shining ringlets. He wears a heavy Stoka watch on one wrist, and suede boots with heels.

Older Handmen carry themselves with a different style.

The Slug’s suit is more conservative, his face masklike, his ruthlessness complete. In the younger ones you can still see traces of humanity; in the older ones, never, nothing but the inhuman glimmer in their calculating eyes. Back in Jaspeer they all had military ranks: captains, colonels, generals. Here they have a family structure and call themselves cousins, brothers, and uncles. All the same.

The Ferret wrestles heavy plasm batteries to and from his illegal tap. It’s a struggle for him because he’s a slender man, and sweat drips from his forehead to splash on the scarred soft rubber flooring installed to muffle the thuds of the heavy work.

The other, the Slug, is obese and in authority. He is in charge of the cash, which is kept in a drawer of his desk. He has his feet propped atop the desk while he watches the younger man work, and gestures largely with both hands as he talks on a telephone headset.

The Ferret wrestles the last battery into place, puts the tap on it, and stops to light a cigaret. The Slug, talking to a girlfriend, drones on without cease.

Plasm stolen by the Silver Hand is usually not consumed by the gangsters themselves. They sell it, at inflated prices, to customers who have no choice but to pay their extortionate fees. But a certain percentage of the plasm is used within their own operation: to locate cargoes worth hijacking, to intimidate and murder, to provide life-extension treatments for their leaders. If necessary, to kill each other, though there hasn’t been a war among the Silver Hand in twenty years, and being a Handman is as safe as—probably safer than—banking.

Aiah watches the pair for two hours. Junior Handmen or independent affiliates—“brothers” or “nephews” in Hand-man jargon—turn up every so often to drop off empty plasm batteries and bags of cash and pick up newly charged batteries. Sometimes they stay around and gossip for a while before leaving. It’s all routine.

Aiah approves of the Silver Hand’s having a routine day. They’re much more likely to relax their security and give their operations away.

Except when there are visitors, the Slug stays on the phone the whole time, alternating business and romantic interests. Aiah keeps careful tabs on when each call is made, and the subject matter of the conversation, and plans to requisition a copy of the phone records in order to discover to whom the Slug’s been talking. Eventually the Slug takes his headphones off and goes off to a midbreak rendezvous with one of his girlfriends. Now that the phone is free, the Ferret fastidiously cleans the earphones and the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, then makes a few calls of his own.

Until there’s a visitor. He’s a stranger, an older man with gray hair and the unnaturally healthy flesh of someone on life extension. He is thin and dapper, a mixture of characteristics—youthful stride, hatchet face, a grizzled mustache. He hammers angrily on the door, and is annoyed when he finds the Slug is gone.

“He didn’t know you were coming,” the Ferret apologizes.

“I told that stupid whore of his,” the thin man says, showing yellow teeth.

“Which one?” the Ferret asks, but the stranger is una-mused.

“I need access to the tap, third shift. My boys are hijacking a barge down at the Navy Yard.”

The Ferret is interested. “I used to pick stuff from the Yard sometimes, when I was nephew with Daddy Cathobert’s crew. But we’d have to take care of Commodore Grophadh first.”

The stranger scowls. “Grophadh’s gone—got his ass retired after the coup. But his lad Armaki’s still there, and I make sure he’s taken care of.”

(Aiah, back in her office, carefully detaches a fragment of her consciousness from her anima and scrawls notes to herself across a pad of paper. Grophadh. Armaki. People who got paid off when the Navy Yard got looted. And a theft in the Navy Yard early tomorrow—she would have to put experienced observers in place.)

The thin man marches off to rouse the Slug from his girlfriend’s bed. Aiah continues her surveillance for another hour, then turns the business over to one of her mages and writes a formal report of what she’s overheard, which goes into a file in the secure room. There, she looks through books of known Handmen the department had got from the central police headquarters—armed with one of Constantine’s warrants, she and some assistants had just marched in and taken them, much to the cops’ chagrin—and in one of the books she finds the gray stranger. His name is Gurfith, and his rank within the Silver Hand is given as “under-uncle,” which puts him fairly high in the hierarchy, working directly under one of the powerful uncles, the equivalent of a street colonel back in Jaspeer. For him to be involved personally in a hijacking means that whatever is being taken has a greater than average value.

The plasm house where she’s made these observations is one of those given her by Sergeant Lamarath. Every single one of them has proved genuine. Lamarath is holding by his agreement.

And now that word of her arrangement with Lamarath is leaking out into other half-worlds, more tips are coming in through Ethemark, arriving faster than the department’s limited resources can process them. She is beginning to realize that the half-worlds are some of the best intelligence sources she’ll ever have.

She looks at the file, then closes it and returns it to the shelves. Aiah will probably have to let the hijacking take place. She doesn’t know anyone in the police structure or the Navy she can alert, not without a chance of it getting back to Under-uncle Gurfith.

Unless, she thinks, some of Constantine’s mercenaries decide to hold some unscheduled maneuvers in the area of the Navy Yard.

She’ll have to think about that.

Constantine’s level eyes gaze out over the tips of his tented fingers; he looks somberly out the oval windows of his Owl Wing office while Aiah sits before him and makes her report. “We’re trying to set up a proper operations center,” she says, “but because the technicians and engineers spend most of their time repairing damage, the job isn’t getting done, and so we’re doing our mage ops from our offices. It’s inefficient and any surveillance requiring more than one mage is difficult to coordinate.”

Constantine continues to direct his gaze out the window—it is as if his mind were worrying over another problem entirely—but his answer shows he had been paying attention. “Will you have your ops room completed by the time you commence active operations?”

“That is hard to say.”

He turns to Aiah and places his hands on the surface of his desk. It is a beautiful piece of furniture, ebony, inlaid with gilt and mother-of-pearl.

“Let me know when the deadline approaches, and if necessary I will assign more people to you. The repairs to the Palace are crucial to the physical safety of the government and its workers, and should take precedence.”

There is a gentle knock at the door, followed by the appearance of Constantine’s secretary, a Cheloki named Drusus. “President Drumbeth wishes to see you, sir,” he says, and Drumbeth is in the room before Aiah and Constantine have more than half-risen from their chairs.

The president of the triumvirate is a small man, but he is made taller by erect military posture and bushy gray hair. Though he resigned from his colonelcy after the coup, he wears his blue suit as if it were a uniform. The coup that overthrew the Keremaths was his creation, and he had been intelligent enough to make Constantine a part of it, and of the government he formed afterward.

He shakes Constantine’s hand briskly. “I was passing by your office,” he says, “and thought I would take the opportunity to speak with you.”

Drumbeth’s impassive copper face and slit eyes are impossible to read, and Aiah concludes that his unresponsive face must have served him well in his previous post as director of military intelligence.

Constantine introduces Aiah. “Miss Aiah was giving a report on her progress in establishing her department,” he says.

“I would be interested to hear it,” says Drumbeth. He takes a chair without being invited, and nods at Aiah. “Please continue, miss.”

Aiah is near the end of her presentation, but for the triumvir’s benefit she begins again from the start. His narrow eyes watch her impassively as she speaks. Occasionally he interrupts to ask a pertinent question.

“Very good, Miss Aiah,” he concludes. “You seem to have done well for someone”—his slit eyes flicker for a moment—“for someone so young.”

Aiah is conscious of heat rising to her face. “Thank you, sir.”

Drumbeth turns to Constantine, then seems to remember something. “Ah—it occurs to me to ask you,” he says, “about some prisoners you have ordered released from our jails.”

Constantine gives him an expectant look. “Prisoners?”

“A commissioner of the Special Police—Anacheth. One of his subordinates, Commander Coapli, and a general of the former regime’s army, Brandig. The worst kind of men the old regime had to offer, torturers and killers. After you interviewed them, you ordered them all released from the Metropolitan Prison.”

A cold finger touches Aiah’s spine. These are Taikoen’s victims, the men Constantine was feeding to his creature.

“Ah,” Constantine says. “I recall now. I released them after I received their medical reports. They were all in the last stages of a fatal illness, and it seemed needless cruelty to keep them confined. In fact, I believe Anacheth and Coapli have already died.”

Drumbeth nods. “So I have been told. It was Coapli’s death, reported on the news, that made me wonder how he had come to be released from prison.”

“I hoped,” Constantine says, “to be able to set a better example of humanity than our predecessors.”

“That was good of you, I suppose.” Drumbeth’s tone implies indifference to the fate of Anacheth and his minions.

“Also,” Constantine adds, “I did not want it said that we secretly murdered them while they were in custody.”

Drumbeth nods agreement, but as he nods he continues to speak. “But nevertheless you are Minister of Resources, not Security, and you aren’t among those authorized to order the discharge of prisoners.”

“I apologize if I exceeded my authority,” Constantine says. “Since my Cheloki had arrested these people in the first place, and in view of the great challenges facing Gentri and the safety ministry, I thought it was easier simply to order them released myself.”

“That will no longer be necessary,” Drumbeth says. His voice is firm: Aiah sees an officer here, used to command. “Gentri now has a firm enough command of his department. If there are people whom you wish to have released on humanitarian grounds, call my attention to them, and after a review I will order their discharge.”

“You are busy enough. I would not want to trouble you with these minor matters.”

“Then don’t.” Drumbeth’s voice remains indifferent. “But if criminals are to be released, I wish it to be with my knowledge, or with Gentri’s.”

Constantine nods gracefully. “As you wish, Triumvir.”

Drumbeth tilts his head. “By the way—I wonder if you have seen the early news reports?”

Constantine looks at him with grave curiosity. “I have not had the opportunity.”

“There are stories in several media of a decision made at yesterday’s cabinet meeting concerning the fate of the Qer-wan Arms Company. The reports are unanimous in indicating the government’s decision to sell. In fact, my office has already been contacted by firms wishing to tender a bid.”

Constantine nods. His usual dramatic tones and extravagant gestures are suppressed: he sits upright at the table, and speaks in a lowered tone. “Such eagerness would indicate that the sale of the company, complete with its current set of government contracts, should provide the government an excellent source of revenue.”

“That may be true,” Drumbeth says. “But the fact remains that, contrary to the news reports, the government has not as yet decided the fate of the company, and may not decide to part with a resource so vital to its security.”

“Guns and ammunition,” Constantine says, “are available in quantity, and for rather better prices, in many other places.”

“So you said yesterday,” Drumbeth says. “It isn’t my intention to renew the debate, but instead to note my concern at reports of the inner workings of our cabinet now appearing in news reports.” A glint, steely in Shieldlight, appears in Drumbeth’s narrow eyes. “It would seem that someone is attempting to manipulate the situation through selected leaks to the media.”

A ghost of a shrug rolls through Constantine’s shoulders. He continues to hold his gestures to a minimum, and Aiah wonders if he is afraid he might give himself away with one of them. “It is to be expected, I suppose,” he says. “If they are to have wider participation in government, as we seem to agree they should, the public must be educated in such matters.”

“Educated,” Drumbeth says. “Not manipulated. Forcing the government’s hand this way will not be tolerated, and if I can discover the offender he may find that some of his most cherished projects—” His slitted eyes glance for a deliberate moment in Aiah’s direction. “His most cherished projects,” he continues, “will be vetoed, or given to someone else.”

“I’ve been a neglectful host,” Constantine says. “May I offer you coffee? Tea? A glass of brandy perhaps?”

“Some other time,” Drumbeth says, rising. “I have a full shift ahead of me.”

“Damn the man!” Constantine cries after Drumbeth leaves. He hammers a heavy fist into his palm. “He is—” The words jam in his throat, and instead he waves the fist at the door. “This is unsupportable! Dressing me down in front of a subordinate!”

Aiah shrinks from the storm of anger. “I wouldn’t call it dressing down …,” she says.

Constantine is not consoled. “How dare he check me!” he roars. “After everything I have done! After I set him in power!” He paces behind his desk, marching back and forth as fury sparks from his eyes. “An arms company!” he says. “Badly managed, fat with overpaid Keremath sycophants, their product inferior and overpriced…” He laughs. “And this shambles is so vital to the security of Caraqui? Our ex-colonel Drumbeth of all people should know how common arms companies are, how easy their product is to come by—” “What are you going to do about Taikoen?” Aiah interrupts.

Constantine stops dead, looks at her with the anger still blazing from his eyes, but the rage is gone from his voice, and his tone is thoughtful. “Taikoen?” he says. “He has General Brandig now—he’s an old man, in bad condition, but still should last him another day or two. I will not owe him another for two weeks or so…” He straightens, fingers his chin in thought. “I must look at your files,” he says. “Taikoen can feed on the Silver Hand for months… may even do us some good.”

Aiah swallows. She has observed the Handmen closely and hates them all, but she wouldn’t wish Taikoen on any of them, can’t imagine desiring that the cold, vicious intelligence of that deadly monster should dwell in the heart of the worst imaginable villain.

“I don’t want anyone going through my files in that way,” she says. “Not to give people to… that creature.”

“Miss Aiah.” A dangerous growl. “It is necessary.”

“No!” Aiah cries. “It is mad to feed that thing!”

In less than a moment Constantine has crossed the room to stand before her, his big hands crushing her shoulders, fiery eyes burning into hers. She shrinks back, afraid of sudden violence, but Constantine’s voice is low, without anger. “Without Taikoen we would not have Caraqui,” he says. “Feeding him is the price we pay for the good we are able to do now. And if I should break the agreement I have with him…” His tongue licks dry lips, and there is a haunted look in his eyes. “My life would not be worth a half-dinar.”

A shadow of Constantine’s fear shivers through Aiah, and she locks her arms around him, holding him close, pressing her cheek to his velvet shoulder. “There must be another way. Destroy him. It is possible to kill a hanged man, isn’t it?”

“Do you think we live in a chromoplay?” Scorn burns in his eyes. “We find the monster, then kill it with a magic dagger, or by using an obscure geomantic focus found in some old book?” There is a moment’s hesitation before Constantine says, “Taikoen may yet be useful. I will choose the people carefully. There will be no accidents, and I will make his subjects the most deserving imaginable.”

His big hands caress her, but nevertheless a chill runs up her spine. She has become a part of this now, a part of the apparatus that feeds people to Taikoen.

She is a party to this atrocity. But that’s what she must be, if that is what it takes to preserve her lover, and to create the New City.

“I don’t want to know when it happens,” she says. “I don’t want to know who, and when, and why it is being done.”

Constantine gives a bitter laugh. “I would not burden you with that. Ta^;koen is my poison alone. You will never see him or hear of him after this.” His arms tighten around her, threaten to drive the wind from her body. “Taikoen is the greatest burden I bear, the greatest evil I know. Yet I must deal with him. And though it is unjust of me even to ask, I find I need to share this burden a little—I wish your understanding and support. 1 need you to believe that what I am doing is right.”

Aiah’s mind whirls. She has never seen Constantine like this, never seen him in a situation where he did not possess absolute confidence and mastery. He needs her support, her trust. What can she do but give it?

He is, she realizes, almost as isolated in this country as she. For all his talents, when Constantine faces Taikoen, he faces the creature alone.

“Yes,” she says numbly, “of course. I understand.”

She will do what she can.

TRIUMVIR HILTHI SPEAKS “THE MORAL WEALTH OF THE NATION” THIRD SHIFT TODAY!

“If some of the family want to apply,” Aiah says, “I can give them some jobs. But I need particular skills.”

“Skills?” Aiah’s grandmother sounds suspicious, as if Aiah is speaking a foreign language. “What kind of skills?”

“The department is hiring only two kinds of staff: mages and clerical. And a few supervisors who will also be mages and clerks.”

“Your brother Stonn needs a job.”

“Stonn has a criminal record,” Aiah says. “He’d never pass the security check.”

Galaiah is unperturbed. “You’re in charge, ne? Fix the security check. Stonn needs to get out of Jaspeer, away from friends who get him in trouble.”

Galaiah is an optimist where Stonn’s character is concerned. He is a petty criminal, with a petty criminal’s mind: impulsive, feckless, unpredictable, short-tempered. He would be a disaster as a member of the PED.

“Nana,” Aiah says. “I can’t fix the security check. It’s not done in my department—we contract it out to the political police.”

Sorya’s Force of the Interior. The last thing Aiah wants is for Sorya to get access to the minds of her relatives.

“It’s a bad day when you won’t give your brother a job!” Galaiah says. “You got to help out your family!”

Aiah changes tack. “Let me tell you what the department pays,” Aiah says. “I’ve checked on Worldwide News and put the figures in Jaspeeri dalders.”

Galaiah listens to the figures, and when Aiah finishes there is a dubious silence on the other end of the line. “That’s not much,” she says. “Your niece Qismah is getting more on the dole.”

“That’s because she’s got kids,” Aiah says. Raised on the dole herself, she absorbed the intricacies of its regulations with her mother’s milk.

“But no,” she goes on, “we can’t pay much. If the department does a good job, I’ll get a bigger budget.”

“How about your longnose lover?” Galaiah asks. “Can he get one of your kin a job?”

“Constantine’s not a longnose, he’s a Cheloki.” Aiah can’t quite resist the correction.

The old lady is firm. “If he’s not one of the Cunning People, then he’s a longnose.”

“Clerks and mages,” Aiah says. “That’s what I can hire. Without criminal records, without knowledge of crime. Because anything shady would come out in the plasm scans, and then they’d use it against me, ne?”

“Got no mages in the family,” Galaiah says, thinking out loud. “Well, there’s Esmon’s Khorsa.”

“Khorsa I would hire.” She is a witch, engaged to Aiah’s cousin Esmon. She had also helped Aiah on her flight from Jaspeer.

“I think she probably makes more money at the Wisdom Fortune Temple.”

“Probably,” Aiah agrees.

“And clerks,” Galaiah says. “You need clerks.”

“Tell everyone,” Aiah says, “what I need. But I can’t promise I’ll hire anyone.”

“If someone wants to try for one of these jobs,” Galaiah says, “can you send them some money for the trip?”

Aiah sighs. “Yes,” she says. “I’ll do that.”

And hopes, as she ends the call, that she isn’t subsidizing her family’s vacations.

Anstine, Aiah’s newly hired receptionist, makes his way out of Aiah’s office, and then the door fills with Constantine. Observing office protocol, he very properly closes the door behind him before he folds her in his arms and kisses her.

“Can you stay long?” she asks.

His head gives a brief shake. “I came only to warn you,” he says. “Yes?”

“You are to receive a visit tomorrow, 13:00 or thereabouts. The triumvirate, plus any cabinet ministers who feel an interest. They want to see what you’ve accomplished.”

Alarm sings through Aiah’s veins. “But we’ve barely started… They’re not going to see anything.”

He slips from her embrace, moves to stand by the window. “That’s as may be,” he says, “but they already have plans for you.”

“What plans?” Promptly. “And who?”

“Colonel Drumbeth is considering placing a military officer in your department to advise on matters that cross into his department. I suspect it’s to make certain that the military gets its share of what you find.”

Aiah bites back annoyance. She has no inclination to be the military’s personal plasm diver.

“Can’t you head him off?” she asks.

Constantine shrugs. Below, Shieldlight winks silver off glass, glows green off rooftop gardens. “I can argue against it, to be sure, but—as we have observed—I can’t stop Drumbeth from doing anything he really desires to do. He and the military are in charge, after all. But…” He makes a little sideways gesture with his hand, indicating room for maneuver. “We may have to do a little trading. It may be best to accept Drumbeth’s officer in exchange for keeping out Parq’s priest.”

“Priest?” The notion seems too absurd for Aiah to even take alarm.

Constantine flashes his teeth as he speaks. “The Keremaths took power with the backing of the Dalavans, remember. The Keremaths gave the Dalavans special privileges afterward, and various sumptuary and moral laws were passed obliging the population to conform to rigorous Dala-van standards of conduct and morality.”

Pigeons bob about on the window ledge, red button eyes all without a hint of life. “I can’t say I’ve observed any stringent moral codes in force since I’ve been here,” Aiah observes.

“The laws, as with all Keremath laws, have been loosely enforced, or not enforced at all. But now that Parq is a third of the government, he wishes to enforce the laws that give his faith its special privileges. He wants to create a Dalavan police force to enforce the moral strictures, and he wishes to put an ombudsman in every department to make certain that department guidelines are not in conflict with the Dalavan faith.”

“Great Senko!”

He looks at her sidelong, irony curling his lips. “I would avoid any promiscuous mention of the immortals when Parq is around,” he says.

“Drumbeth and Hilthi won’t permit this, will they?”

“I assume not. Hilthi is a moralist, but he’s not a Dala-van moralist. And Drumbeth no more wants one of Parq’s spies in every office than we do.” He frowns, and his fingers tap lightly on the window glass in thought. “Parq may have brought up the issue only in hope of heading off the activist wing of his own party, which has denounced his personal version of the faith as halfhearted, indulgent, and temporizing—which is true—and which has denounced Parq himself as tyrannous, corrupt, and venal—which is also true.”

“Perhaps Parq has made the demand only to trade them for something else he really wants,” Aiah says.

Constantine looks at her, approving eyes gleaming in reflected Shieldlight. “I see you have learned somewhat of politics since you have been in Caraqui.”

“I have a good teacher.”

He gives a low, immodest laugh, then turns back to the window. An airship lies on the far horizon, Shieldlight flashing silver off its skin, off its propeller disks. Behind it, the sky suddenly flashes with the profile of Gargelius Enchuk, plasm hype for his new recording.

“We shall see what Parq truly wants in time,” Constantine says. “It may be that he has no true plan at all other than to seek advantage wherever he can find it. But we must give him a victory sooner or later, or he may realize that he is better off in opposition. And as he is the spiritual leader of rather more than a third of our population, we cannot afford to have him oppose us.”

Aiah’s thoughts churn uneasily. “What can you give such a man that will content him?”

“He is so corrupt that he may settle for money, or an hour of video time every week to preach to the citizens, or a beautiful woman. We shall see.”

Aiah turns, puts her arms around Constantine’s waist. “And what will content you?” she asks.

Constantine affects to give this his consideration. “Dominion of the habited world,” he says, “and the ordering of it; the piercing of the Shield and the discovering of the glories that lie beyond; the captaincy of the great outflowing of humanity into the worlds there discovered, or built entire if there are none to be found; the creation of the nations into which humanity settles; the assurance that all patterns and powers are in order… and then, perhaps, I may retire and write my memoirs.”

There is a languid smile on Constantine’s face as he speaks, and irony puts an edge on his voice; but there is a chill glow in his eyes as he speaks the words, and Aiah feels an answering shiver along her spine as she realizes that he is at least partially sincere.

And then he laughs, a sudden surprising boom that shatters her awestruck mood, and his arms cinch her below her ribs; he picks her up and she is flying, spinning in circles, her feet sweeping papers from her desk…

He sets her down lightly, kisses her before she can catch her breath. “Perhaps I will forfeit it all,” he said, “for a few hours in your company, after our business is concluded today.”

“I wouldn’t want you to give up so much.”

He laughs again, spins round on his heel, thrusts out an arm at the scene beyond the window, the long cluttered view of the city built out over its sea. “Foolish to speak of ordering the world,” he says, “when I am confined to the role of a minor minister in a chronically misruled and impoverished metropolis…” He laughs again. “You would not believe the absurdities to which I am subjected. Yesterday’s cabinet meeting spent hours discussing a problem having to do with capital spending. It was a thousand radii beyond trivial, with no remedy besides, and it occupied a full day.”

“I believe you volunteered for the job,” Aiah reminds.

He gives her a sly look. “Miss Aiah, I believe you will keep me honest.”

She walks up to him and straightens a fold in his lapel. “We must both learn to be good subordinates.” He gives a dry little laugh. “I will do what I can.” “Will I see you third shift?” “Ah. 21:00, perhaps?”

“And no cocktail parties later? No receptions? Cabinet meetings? Duty calls on the dolphins? Visits from the winner of the Junior New City League’s essay contest?”

“I believe not.” He gives a lazy smile. “But I will have to consult my calendar in regard to that last point.”

She stands on tiptoe and kisses his cheek. “Till later, then.”

His brows rise in mock offense. “Such a slight good-bye? I would have a better memory of you than that.”

His arms coil around her again—the pigeons on the window ledge see the swift movement and fly in panic—and Aiah laughs as Constantine bends her over backward, like a swooning girl in a chromoplay, and dines for a long moment on her arched throat.

21:00. Aiah’s veins tingle with the plasm she’s just fed herself to keep weariness at bay. Constantine is on time, with a bottle of fine brandy and a crystal bowl of fruit plundered from one of the Keremaths’ rooftop arboretums.

Aiah feasts greedily on grapes, red-skinned and with a cool taste, their tiny seeds sweet like crystal-sugar, as if the fruit were stuffed with candy. Constantine pours brandy, swirls it in the glass, and sniffs it delicately, nostrils high, like a haughty bronze figure standing on some ancient wall gazing down at some conquered city. It is made, Aiah knows, from actual grapes, grown in actual gardens, not in vats with chemicals and hermetics.

“You have done admirably with your department,” Constantine says. “Two weeks, and it is actually functioning.”

“Not well,” Aiah grudges. She sighs, looks at her brandy, then puts the glass down. “When I worked for the Plasm Authority in Jaspeer I discovered that no one there ever talked to anyone else—our suggestions and complaints were transmitted off into the void, and were never acted on or even acknowledged, and orders came down from the hundred-fiftieth floor as if from beyond the Shield, with no consultation, no notion of how things actually stood, no concept of how to make it work.”

“Institutionalized dysfunction,” Constantine says.

“Oh yes. And institutionalized frustration as well. So now I am trying to set up the PED in order to facilitate lines of communication, to make certain that everyone has access to authority when needed…” She sighs again and picks up her brandy glass. “But that authority is me, and that means I am consulted on everything. I have never worked so hard in my life, and still the department only lurches along.”

“It will dance and skip, given time.”

“The Ascended willing,” Aiah says, conceding somewhat to superstition as she sketches the Sign of the Ascended in the air with her brandy glass.

“But you have a department,” Constantine says, “and you have not gone mad, or had a fit of the vapors, or checked yourself into the hospital for a long course of sedation.”

“Give me time,” Aiah says, and smiles into her glass as she takes a sip.

“You deal well with Ethemark?”

She shrugs, feels a little insect-twitch of distaste crawl cross her face. “As I must. He is gifted, even if he isn’t my choice.”

“But you have hired other twisted people.”

“They’re applying in swarms!” Aiah says. “Ethemark or his kin must have put the word out. I’m hiring only the most qualified.”

“As you should.” He cocks his head, regards her. “But you don’t like them?”

She sighs, puts down her glass. “Is it bad of me to wish the twisted people well, but not to wish them in my vicinity?”

He purses his lips as he chooses words. “Bad, I will not say. Inconsistent, perhaps?”

Aiah sighs and throws up her hands. “Then I am inconsistent. But it is what I feel.”

“You are honest with yourself, at least. You do not lie to yourself about your feelings. But despite your distaste you hire them, if you think they’re qualified, and that is admirable of you.”

She looks at him. “They never make you uneasy? Or even afraid?” She thinks of Dr. Romus, the snake-mage, and represses a shudder.

Constantine considers this for a moment. “I must admit,” he says finally, “that I find myself comfortable amid all manner of unlikely people.”

Aiah reaches for her brandy. “That is your gift. It isn’t mine.”

“People born with money and position, I find, often possess this talent. I was raised a prince, and even considering that I was a prince of pirates, still it makes for a level of security in dealing with others.”

“And I’m a poor kid raised on the dole,” Aiah says. “But I don’t see what that has to do with consistency, or the lack of it. The rich seem to be as inconsistent as anyone else.”

He smiles. “Conceded absolutely,” he says. “But we were speaking of security, not hypocrisy. The Barkazil were refugees in Jaspeer, poor, confined to low-status jobs. Perhaps they competed with the twisted for work or for living quarters.”

“So far as I can tell,” Aiah mumbles into her drink, “we competed with poor longnose Jaspeeris, who hated us. I hardly ever saw a twisted person when I was growing up.”

“A theory only.” Constantine shrugs, and then his eyes turn to her. She sees in them a glow as mellow as that in the brandy that swirls in his glass. “Since you put such store in communication between members of the department,” he says, “let me communicate to you what I perceive in your PED. I am utterly gratified that you came to Caraqui. I was right to choose you for this work. You confirm my judgment every day, and I thank you.”

Heat rises in Aiah’s cheeks. She touches her glass to his, the crystal chime singing in the air for a long moment before she drinks. Constantine’s lips, tasted next, are afire with brandy.

Desire has its way. Neither is in a hurry, and both in a mood to prolong this banquet of pleasure as long as possible: there are hors d’oeuvres on the sofa, soups and salads sampled on the bed, and then the main course, served with a full range of tangy condiments.

Aiah pushes Constantine onto his back and captures him between her legs, gazing down at his supine body, the broad cords of muscle that cross his massive shoulders and barrel chest. Her breath hisses between her teeth as she rides him. He regards her with a lazy, catlike smile, indolent eyes half-closed. His big hands set her skin afire where he touches her. She bends to lick his scent from him, covering his chest with a waterfall of her dark hair.

“I adore you utterly, Miss Aiah,” he says, baritone voice a resonant murmur in her ear, like the deep bedrock far below whispering a secret to her; and the words set her plasm-charged nerves alight, firing her flesh, melting her groin, and suddenly she finds herself peaking, the climax coming all unexpected, and from the words alone…

Breathless, she grabs fistfuls of his pectorals and pushes herself upright, arching her back, looking down at him through the skein of her hair.

That was fun, she thinks. And fortunately, she adds to herself, there are plenty more where that one came from.

She has yet to purchase any sleepwear, so afterward she pulls an undershirt over her head so that she and Constantine won’t stick together. He smiles at the sight.

“I should buy you some dainties,” he says, “satins and lace.” He smiles. “I need recreation, a break from my official worries. It will be good for me to exercise my imagination in this regard.”

“You gave me that lovely negligee of gold silk,” Aiah recalls, “but I had to leave it behind in Jaspeer.”

“I will replace it with a better,” Constantine says. He throws his arms over his head and brings his body to full stretch, arching on the bed as he brings slumbering muscle awake. “What now?” he says. “Shall I fetch the brandy bottle, and we toast each other till end of sleep shift?”

“I had in mind a more literary pursuit.”

She reaches to the bedside table, takes Volume Fourteen of the Proceedings, then returns to the bed and depolarizes the window to let in a little illumination.

Constantine screws up his eyes against the light. “You’ve trapped me, by the immortals,” he murmurs. “Trapped, deprived of my strength, and no hope but to attend.”

“Exactly,” Aiah says, “it was an ambush all along.” She joins him on the bed and props the heavy volume on her sternum. “Now listen, and I promise you will not be bored.”

He bolsters his head on his arm. Aiah turns pages, tries to find the choicest place to start. “We therefore recommend the complete reformation of human infrastructure along the following lines,” she begins, and hears Constantine puff disbelief.

“Give the fellow credit for ambition.”

“You’ll be giving him credit for more in a moment.”

She reads on, spicing abstruse comments about building codes and social foundations with her own footnotes. Rohder’s Research Division had uncovered what they called “fractionate intervals,” a distance at which plasm generation could be multiplied that was smaller than the smallest accepted unit, the radius. The results, all things being perfect, would be at most a 20 percent increase in the generation of plasm……

“Let me see that,” Constantine says, and reaches over her to pluck the book from her hands.

Aiah watches Constantine’s constant scowl as he reads, snorts, flips to another page, reads again. At the point where he reads three consecutive pages, she snatches the book from his hands and throws it over her shoulder to the floor. He looks at her in surprise.

“Why did you do that?”

“What do you think?” she asks.

He frowns critically. “Badly written,” he says, “the worst of scholastic- and specialist-prose, never to the point, fogged with obscurities and solipsisms. And the matter, these fractionate intervals, is either the greatest delusion in the world, or—”

“Or Rohder is a genius,” Aiah says, “though maybe not in writing reports.” She looks at him. “Remember that I told you no one in the Authority ever talked to anyone else? They had a way of augmenting plasm, but they never realized it.”

“If all this is true, then you may have saved the revolution, and perhaps the world.” He reaches across her. “Give me that book again.”

Aiah puts a hand on his shoulder and firmly pushes him back to the mattress. “If I have just saved the world,” she says, “don’t I deserve to have your undivided attention for the next few hours?”

Constantine’s look softens. One hand enfolds her shoulder, the massive instrument, made for smashing bricks or bending iron, now gentle as the warmth in his eyes.

“Very well,” he says. “You shall have it.”

Aiah can sense, in the taste of his lips, the tangy flavor of possibility. You may have saved the revolution… She is, then, more than the mistress of a powerful man promoted above her abilities: she has seen something no one else has, and will now arrange to bring it before the world.

It is as if the future has her name written on it. She wonders if this is how Constantine feels all the time, if he looks on the future as something he owns, has nestled in the palm of one of his giant hands.

Maybe so. But for now, Aiah is content with her triumph, and with her place in things to come.